Apple has pulled an ultrathin notebook out of its innovation hat. The company unveiled the wireless MacBook Airat the Macworld Expo on Tuesday.

MacBook Air measures 0.16 inches at its thinnest point, while its maximum thickness of 0.76 inches is less than the thinnest point on competing notebooks. MacBook Air boasts a 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display, a full-size and backlit keyboard, a built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing, and a trackpad with multi-touch gesture support so users can pinch, rotate and swipe.

“We’ve built the world’s thinnest notebook — without sacrificing a full-size keyboard or a full-size 13-inch display,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “When you first see MacBook Air, it’s hard to believe it’s a high-performance notebook with a full-size keyboard and display. But it is.”

No Performance Sacrifice

MacBook Air is powered by a 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache, and includes as standard features 2GB of

memory, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive, and 802.11n Wi-Fi technology and Bluetooth 2.1. An optional 64GB solid-state drive contains no moving parts for added durability.

Richard Shim, an analyst at IDC, said the MacBook Air is finding praise and criticism. Two of the most common criticisms of ultraportable notebooks are performance and features sacrifice. Apple’s MacBook Air overcomes some of the obstacles of previous ultraportable machines and finds praise in so doing.

“Apple is using one of the most up-to-date processors in the Core 2 Duo. They worked with Intel to shrink the package, so you are not giving up performance. On the optical side, you are able to use another PC’s optical drive to install applications with a feature called Remote Disk, which is new to the industry,” Shim said.

MacBook Air users can buy the companion MacBook Air SuperDrive, a compact external drive designed for MacBook Air, for…

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